Examining the Effects of Environmental Components on Tourism Destination Competitiveness: The Moderating Impact of Community Support

Abstract

Contemporarily, tourism sector is a highly competitive environment, which forces tourism players to provide better visitor services in order to stay competitive. In rural tourism, a growing niche in the tourism market, multiple components of environmental constructs play a crucial role in contributing to the sustainability and competitiveness of rural tourism destinations. Hence, this study examines the impact of environment components on development of rural tourism destination competitiveness from a local community perspective. In addition, community support was adopted as moderator variable to examine the relationship among the constructs. 299 respondents comprising of residents of rural tourism in Sarawak, Malaysia took part voluntarily in this study. Data analysis was performed using SPSS Version 21.0 and Smart PLS 2.0 (M3) to assess the developed model, based on path modelling and then bootstrapping. Interestingly, the findings revealed that four of the environmental constructs have had a significant positive impact on destination competitiveness from local communities' perspective.

Research on Interactions between the Economy and Environment in Tourism Development: Case of Qingyang, China

“…Additionally, taking South-East Asian countries as examples, Brahmasrene and Lee [30] discovered that the tourism industry could inhibit carbon emissions, and that ecotourism was effective. Furthermore, Chin et al [31] studied the impact of the environment on the development of tourism in Malaysia, and found that a quality ecological environment would promote the competitiveness of rural tourism destinations effectively.…”

The significance of cultural resources in enhancing competitiveness of tourism destinations: TOURCOMSERBIA model

“…(Rosciano, et al, 2013;Blancas et al, 2015). Scientific studies have also been dedicated to identifying key target groups and stakeholders within tourism, encompassing both internal and external stakeholders, such as DMOs (Dias et al, 2021), both domestic and foreign visitors (Zeng et al, 2021;Xu et al, 2021, Jangra et al, 2021, members of the local community (Chee-Hua et al, 2016;García-Almeida & Gartner., 2021;Lai et al, 2021) as well as experts and members of academia (Wong et al, 2008;Blancas et al, 2015) and representatives of public and private sectors within the destinations (Goffi & Cucculelli, 2019;Ndivo & Manyara., 2018).…”

Culture, Carrying Capacity And Perceived Value On Tourists’ Satisfaction And Revisit Intention

“…Consequently, degradation may happen to part of natural resources due to the increasing number of tourists in that particular tourism destination (Chin et al, 2016). Moreover, the minimum of resource space carrying capacity, tourism economic development carrying capacity, social carrying capacity and ecological environmental capacity help to define the amount of tourism activities of a destination (Du & Pu, 2013).…”

“…Additionally, past researchers such as Tang et al (2013) have underlined the substantial role of a destination related to tourism as the spatial carrier of tourism as the carrying capacity of that particular destination does affect the sustainability of relevant destination and competitiveness in the long run (Chin et al, 2016). Nevertheless, the increasing number of visitors to the destination may cause issues such as overcrowding which can lead to the reduced quality of experience during their visitations (Thong et al, 2019).…”